Pallets are used to store and ship a wide variety of materials or products. Conventional pallets are most often fabricated from wood. One problem associated with wooden pallets is that they are a relatively high cost item. Wooden pallets are generally intended to be used more than once and, if damaged, must be repaired to make their use economically viable. Substantial costs are incurred in repairing wood pallets.
It has previously been proposed to include corrugated cardboard or other paper products in the manufacture of pallets. For example, in Yamaguchi et al U.S. Pat. No. 4,714,026 and Vilella U.S. Pat. No. 4,799,620, combination plastic and paperboard pallets are proposed. Clasen U.S. Pat. No. 5,076,176 discloses a cardboard pallet comprising cardboard sheets separated by a stacked, corrugated cardboard spacers.
Current manufacturing methods, directed at producing corrugated cardboard spacers for use with cardboard pallets, are entirely manual. Manual manufacture of spacers is slow and inefficient due to the relatively small size of the spacer and the attendant specialized manual manipulations required to produce such a pallet spacer. More specifically, the pallet spacers, of the coiled or spiral design, must be tightly wound around themselves to form the desired shape. This coiling or spiraling procedure is particularly difficult to manually perform on a consistent basis.
Further, a consistently shaped spiral pallet spacer is desired for even distribution of weight across the upper and lower surfaces of the pallet. Uneven weight distribution may cause early fatigue or failure of the corrugated cardboard pallet, causing an overall reduction in the useful, operational life of the cardboard pallet.
Applicant's invention is directed to solving the above problems by providing a fully automated apparatus which will reduce the cost associated with making corrugated cardboard pallet spacers and further provide high quality, consistently dimensioned spacers.
Important objects and advantages achieved by Applicant's invention are summarized below.